Samujana, a secluded luxury villa estate based on the Thai island of Koh Samui, is among the earliest hospitality businesses to successfully respond to the challenges of traveling during the COVID-19 era, and the property provides a blueprint of what is to come for hoteliers all around the world.
Koh Samui Airport has resumed flights from May 15th, and Bangkok Airways in conjunction with the Airport, have put in place efficient precautionary measures to ensure a safe, and a relatively seamless travel experience. These measures combined with Samujana’s commitment to cleanliness, make Samujana and Koh Samui, the perfect place for a villa vacation.
Commitment to Cleanliness
- Temperature checks: Samujana checks the temperature of all staff, and guests checking in or entering the resort.
- Masks and hand sanitizer: Samujana provides masks and hand sanitizer for self service use for all our guests (including in all villas and in the private villa common areas). Masks are mandatory for Samujana employees, and our staff also wear gloves when servicing the villas.
- Health and Hygiene Manager: Samujana is committed to the cleanliness and safety of our guests and our employees. We have appointed a new Health And Hygiene Manager role, responsible for the implementation of and ongoing execution of our cleanliness commitment.
As a further commitment to cleanliness, without compromising on our five-star service, Samujana is working with Hong Kong’s Portier Technologies, a guest-facing technology provider, the property has focused on a number of key areas, in order to make on-site facilities and services future-proof. Below, we take a look at some of the ways in which Samujana leveraged the Portier Platform and its cutting-edge technology to respond to changing guest needs.
Social Distancing
A term that we all have become familiar with in the wake of the global pandemic, and governments all over the world have looked to quickly implement social distancing strategies.
At Samujana, social distancing is nothing new, but they are now enforcing stricter policies that include a contactless service by utilising Portier Phones, the property’s guests have always benefited from the notion of ‘so far but yet so close’ via Portier Technologies’ ability to boost contactless service. In that sense, guests can always stay in touch with their villa hosts, and can call them, chat with them and request help or access to on-site services from a single place. This ensures a strong connection between staff and guests, without the need for physical proximity.
By deploying Portier Phones as a single interaction point, Samujana staff now have significantly fewer surfaces to keep clean, and gone are the days of having to go through a compendium page-by-page, especially considering that paper is among the most prone objects when it comes to corona-virus related germs.
In essence, the Portier Platform combines all printed materials, all property information, all staff engagement, all destination-related information, all telephony needs and more in a single place. This empowers hotels to remove physical inventory and concentrate everything within one digital platform.
Education
Via the Portier Platform, Samujana is fully digital, and given the guests’ preference to carry the Portier Phones off-property, staff now explore the island ‘together’ with the guests. In that respect, guests get access to content on corona-virus related topics, always prominently placed on their personalised Portier Phone.
‘I’ll quickly share my location with you, so you can recommend some safe restaurants to go to around me’, ‘Let’s explore the Island Guide on the device, so we only visit places that Samujana staff deem safe’, ‘I wonder if this street-food area is safe’ – all of these concerns are now covered by a combination of Samujana staff and the Portier Platform.
What’s more, Samujana staff can create and manage content that promotes best practices and recommends safety measures to guests, educating them on how to best respond to a new reality. Remember the initial range of government materials explaining how to wash your hands? By placing essentials like this on Portier Phones, Samujana educate their guests in the most digestible way possible.
Guest Engagement
With the Portier Platform at hand, Samujana is actually promoting more guest engagement than ever before – the difference? No touch. While the physical distance between guests and staff has increased, Portier Technologies and Samujana staff have worked hand-in-hand, in order to promote digital proximity.
With this in mind, the property is able to promote on-site services and ultimately deliver a more comprehensive guest experience, without making guests uncomfortable by asking them to interact in person.
